My family has a milk problem. We buy pretty awesome milk– it’s local, it’s organic, it’s unhomogenized, and it’s pasteurized just enough to satisfy the legal requirement– but it’s only available by the full gallon. A gallon of milk– in a family full of people who never developed the taste for cow’s milk– is a LOT.

Lately we’ve settled into a pattern in which we buy two gallons of milk at the start of the month, use the first gallon to make yogurt, and the second gallon goes into a recipe here or there and then just kind of sits around waiting. It goes sour– so we use it for baking and soup instead of desserts and sauces– and then it goes actually bad, so there’s nothing left to do but let the last half-gallon or so clabber and then give it to the chickens.

To combat this waste, I’ve been experimenting with homemade puddings. I love pudding, silky and creamy and sweet, and it’s an excellent way to use up milk.

Below is my master recipe for homemade pudding, followed by a long list of flavor options. Choose your own adventure!

The basic recipe (and some of the less-modified versions, like vanilla and tea leaves) fills 3 half-pint canning jars perfectly. Versions with a large volume of additions (fruit flavored, chocolate almond, etc.) may take 4 half-pints or more.

3 cups whole milk*, divided

2/3 cup turbinado sugar (white or light brown will work, too)

dash of salt

3.5 tablespoons cornstarch or tapioca flour

mise en place:

Pour 1 cup of the milk into a small container and whisk in cornstarch until completely dissolved.

Combine sugar and salt.

Pour the remaining 2 cups milk into a heavy-bottomed saucepot and heat just below medium, stirring frequently, until warmed through and steamy.

Stir in the sugar/salt mixture, mixing well until all crystals are dissolved.

Slowly add the cornstarch/milk mixture, stirring constantly.

Stir constantly and continue to cook until the pudding coats the side of the pot and a light trace is achieved. Remove from heat, continuing to stir through frequently to minimize skin.

Pour into canning jars, filling as close to the top as possible to minimize the formation of skin, lid tightly and chill in the refrigerator for at least 3 hours. Keeps for at least a week, although some flavors may start to suffer after a few days.

*dairy alternatives will also work, but if you want to use a pre-sweetened product (such as Vanilla Silk) sugar should be reduced to 1/3 cup

For very vanilla pudding, stir 1 teaspoon of vanilla bean paste or powder into the sugar/salt mixture. Use a 3/4 teaspoon vanilla bean paste/powder if you’re after something more subtle.

For delicate banana pudding, make as above and layer thin slices of one ripe banana into the jars as you pour in the hot pudding. Chill at least 5 hours to infuse with flavor and use within 3 days. The banana slices will start to oxidize after about 12 hours, so if appearance is important, be prepared to use it sooner rather than later.

For intensely chocolate pudding, make as above but add 1/3 cup of cocoa powder (natural will give a better flavor than Dutched) into the sugar/salt mixture during mise en place.

For chocolate-almond pudding, make as chocolate pudding and add 2 tablespoons of amaretto or almond extract to the milk/cornstarch mixture. Top with slivered or chopped almonds.

For rustic, fruit-speckled pudding (my children especially love strawberry), stir 1 cup of fruit purée into the cold milk and prepare as above. This pudding will be thicker than others due to the pectin in the fruit. If you’re using overripe fruit, it may acidify your milk and cause it to separate, but just keep whisking and have faith– the starch will bring it back together.

For salted caramel pudding, increase salt to 1 teaspoon, and dry caramelize the sugar in a separate pot to a medium golden brown and scrape slowly into steaming milk, stirring constantly to avoid scalding. Especially nice topped with chantilly cream and a few delicate flakes of sea salt just before serving.

For cookies and cream pudding, powder 3 chocolate sandwich cookies and finely crush or chop another six. Prepare pudding as above, then stir these variously destroyed cookies into hot pudding.

For chocolate chip cookie pudding, add a pinch of vanilla powder to the sugar, add 1.5 teaspoons blackstrap molasses and 2 tablespoons browned butter to the cold milk, and layer with a sprinkling of chocolate chips in the jars.

For a unique, sophisticated flavor choice, pour the contents of a tea bag (or about 1tsp finely-crushed loose leaf tea) into the cold milk. Earl grey is a lovely choice, as is Good Earth Sweet and Spicy.

For chocolate mint cookie pudding (great for Thin Mint lovers), prepare as chocolate pudding, then stir 1 teaspoon peppermint extract into the hot pudding. You can also stir in crushed Thin Mints or similar cookies.

I have been buried under a mountain of work all month, and have just now managed to see a glimpse of daylight again.

We dramatically shook up our lives, downsized our possessions and space, and re-committed to building a local, fleshspace community.

I re-thought the storage of my work materials to bring the spinning wheel back out of deep storage. I have a handspinning rare wool kit from several years ago that I have yet to use, and while I do want to spin some of it on my lovely Turkish drop spindle (which I also have yet to master), some of it will need the wheel.

We gave the smalls a day nursery for toys and art and games and books, so that we can move to a daily rhythm that doesn’t include cleaning-up friction.

We made wall space for our bigger maps and pushed Númenor and Ithilien a little harder on reading and writing so we could break through to grammar and semantics. We joined a homeschooling group.

Our pullets laid their first eggs and our older hens gracefully accepted a dramatic change in their own space. I made baskets, the first woven from cedar bark and twined sedge grass, and the last one crocheted from old t-shirts.

We canned applesauce and roasted Bavarian nuts and gave thoughtful Christmas presents and did magic and ate dinner in restaurants and fanned smoke and poured candles.

We watched the snow fall. We fought our way through ice and storm to be with our extended family. We ran and played and warmed up again by the dint of effort and seemingly endless cups of cider and cocoa.

We set up our movie projector. We welcomed a fantastically bristly douglas fir into our living room. I crocheted axolotls. Robert sewed pants. Númenor and Ithilien made felt balls and simmered them in Kool-Aid.

And as the last few hours of 2017 pass us by, we will be busy in the kitchen, making treats and trying experiments and (hopefully) starting some new soap.

May 2018 bring us peace, understanding, joy, victory, and solidarity with our brothers and sisters in darkness. May the returning sun shine bright into the shadows and the rush of spring green lift us all to new life.

This is the me-too shirt for Númenor’s robot shirt. Of course, it’s a different pattern. Not just a different one, but a more complicated one as well. No matter, I thought. At this stage in my sewing, I reasoned, I can handle just about anything.

Thereby I disproved the existence of god. Because if there were such an entity, everyone would have heard them laughing at me.

This pattern was okay in terms of difficulty. It wasn’t too fiddly, and the instructions were pretty clear. But I used a pattern from a designer I’ve had trouble with in the past without making a muslin first. Their clothes are so freaking cute, but I already knew that they really struggled with armscyes and their facings sometimes just didn’t work. And I should have relied more on that past experience. But it was so cute, and the size promised in the pattern was perfect.

And most of the pattern was fine.

But the neckline.

The neckline.

I finished the bodice and called Ithilien over so I could double-check the sizing by popping it over his head. But it wouldn’t fit over his head. It wasn’t even close.

So I unpicked the bodice and tried again. This time he could put it on, but it was tight across the chest and stranglingly tight in the neckline when zipped up.

I unpicked some more. I re-worked the side seams to give him an extra half inch in the chest, and took the zipper out, and cut the back split down an extra inch, and cut the whole neckline an extra half-inch lower. Now it fit fine.

But the neck facing from the pattern obviously wouldn’t work anymore.

So I made up some bias tape with my new, beautiful, antique sad irons, and finished it off with a button and a loop.

And now, well, it’s perfect. Which could be seen as all this effort paying off.

But for me, the thing that makes it most worthwhile to have finally fixed this cute little top is that it reminded me– very painfully– to consider the source when I sew up a pattern. Next time, I’ll be working from a designer I’ve had good experiences with.

Maybe I’m just cynical, but caveat emptor seems to apply even more when it comes to things offered for free. Maybe the modern advice would be closer to caveat usor.

Or, you know, semper muslinus prius facere.

The pattern, which I can’t recommend, is Modern Baby Doll Top by Shwin & Shwin; in addition to the modifications to the neckline and closure discussed above, I also gave it a straight hem. The fabric is the same as last week. The buttons are from my collection. The irons are Geneva 8s, purchased on Etsy.

Númenor is of a certain age now. He’s transitioning from being a little kid to being an unmodified-kid. And part of that, in our family, is that he has recently become responsible for his own wardrobe.

Babies and little kids, the way I see it, live in borrowed clothes. They are welcome to have favorites and to refuse to wear certain things and give input for purchasing decisions as they get older, but nothing really belongs to them. I decide what to buy, what to keep, how and when to mend it, when and how to care for it– they just live in it. But where little kids’ sizing ends, at around size 6/7, that changes.

Whereas in all the smaller sizes Númenor has already had clothing waiting for him when he was big enough to wear it, when he got big enough to wear a 6X/7, there was nothing in the hand-me-down bin. Instead, he got a checklist of clothes and accessories that needed to be in his wardrobe for the summer, and a budget to spend on them.

Of course, one of the ways he’s allowed to allocate funds is to ask me to make things for him. And of all the things he needed, the only one he couldn’t scrape together for himself was short-sleeved shirts. So I pulled out a cut of organic cotton sateen I bought on clearance years ago and showed him a selection of patterns that would work for the fabric, and we got to work.

And, as a bonus, we had enough fabric left over to cut a shirt (from a different pattern, natch) for Ithilien.

This is the first of a pair of coordinating-but-not-matching robot shirts for our summer adventures. The pattern Númenor wanted is a modernist send-up of a huipil– very simple, slightly boxy, with this lovely, smooth-against-the-skin blanket-stitch neckline cut to frame the collarbones.

Believe it or not, I had never used a blanket stitch to encase a rolled, curved hem like this before. It is ideal for the task technically, and a perfectly lighthearted design element for a child’s garment.

All in all, it makes for some gorgeous sunny-afternoon-on-the-back-deck sewing.

Last summer, in a fit of pique, I tried to resign myself to doing shoes for the smalls the conventional way.

I was frustrated with my inability to make a shoe that stayed on Númenor’s foot, and I was out of the natural rubber soling material I use for all-purpose shoes anyway, so I gave in and bought shoes for the smalls. Or at least I tried to.

I went to the websites where I normally buy shoes for Robert and myself. I tried the vendors I’ve been hoping to win a pair from but couldn’t really afford, assuming their kids’ shoes would be cheaper. I tried the brands I’d heard were for hippies. None of them had acceptable shoes for children. Several brands didn’t have kids’ sizes at all, a couple had adult sizes and baby booties but no shoes for children, and the few that had shoes in the right sizes for my kids were so aggressively gendered I couldn’t find anything I would consent to buy, much less anything my funky, post-gender kids were interested in.

So I finally just bought some cheap crap on Zulily. And the smalls loved the way their “storebought shoes” looked, but they were stiff-soled and uncomfortable to wear, and the sneakers took too much work to get on and off, and they couldn’t be laundered, and one of the pairs of shoes I bought after trying my hardest to find things that passed the minimum standard STILL came with a California Prop 65 warning.

And now, 8 months in, the sneakers are worn through in the toes and aglets. The flats still look okay, but they don’t have much time left in the toes, either.

Cons: non-biodegradable, produced with fossil fuels, assembled by slave labor, MUCH more expensive than homemade, produced by the thousands or millions, difficult for smalls to use without help, stiff soles, narrow footbed, cause cancer or reproductive harm, difficult to clean, nearly impossible to repair, packaged in unnecessary plastic, last about 8-10 months

And so, here I am making new shoes for the smalls at home again.

But in the intervening time, I came to a couple new conclusions: first, I only want shoes for the smalls to last less than a year at this point because they grow so fast, that’s about the lifespan of footwear for them anyway. Second: I have been causing myself unnecessary grief using western-style shoes and a storebought pattern.

This time I’m trying a new approach: breech moccasins from a custom pattern I drafted from a water-resist impression of Númenor’s actual feet. The toebox is nice and wide, and the soles are natural rubber crepe, cushioned with a layer of wool blanket and lined with a scrap of cotton muslin. The uppers are sewn together from the few usable bits of an old pair of Robert’s twill pants and hand embroidered in variegated cotton floss. They are designed to be lightweight on the foot and flexible, while still giving moderate protection from rough terrain and the elements.

So far, I love them. They should stand up well, and be easy to mend and patch for a few months, and then, probably at the end of next fall or in the spring, they’ll be ready for the wadding bin.

The skull-print muslin is Blackbeard Skull in Black from the “Blackbeard’s Pirates” collection by Riley Blake Designs.

I don’t know what it is about the last month or so, but I am stuck. I currently have nine WIPs going– everything from fabric I just finished dyeing and haven’t cut yet to a nearly-finished soft toy– and none of them is speaking to me. To make matters worse, when I push forward and try to work on something anyway, I inevitably screw it up.

Case in point: this shirt yoke. I decided that, out of the THREE projects in my current workbag, it was the one that would be easiest to force my way through so I could build momentum for the rest of my life. I nearly finished it this afternoon, sitting on the deck in the sunlight, and when I tried it on Ithilien, I discovered it was too big and the whole thing would have be made over, from the cast-on, so that it could be SIX stitches smaller. Six. Which is actually for the best because the lace I was trying to add to the bodice was a total wreck, because I hadn’t taken the time to chart the line-by-line instructions before I started so that I would have any hope of working it on an increasing piece.

How do I feel about that? Well…

So, I’m giving up. This day can suck it. I’m going to have some cookie butter and try to forget my troubles.

I will be back in a few days to show pictures of our new chicks, and maybe talk about the last things I *did* successfully make before I got stuck in a Philadelphia.

And with any luck and a lot of streaming of sub-par horror movies, maybe next week there will be a real WIP Wednesday.

The sengi, aka elephant shrew, is a small mammal native to the forests, grasslands, and rocky outcroppings of south-eastern Africa. They have a long, flexible snout that allows them to use their amazing sense of smell in any direction without moving their eyes, and it is from this feature’s similarity to the elephant’s trunk that they received their rather fanciful English common name.

Genetic studies have revealed that the sengi is, in fact, more closely related to elephants than to true shrews, despite being only a few inches long and having a lifestyle more typical of rodents than ruminants.

The tiny rufous sengi, one of the smaller varieties of sengi, is less than 4″ long but can run at speeds over 8mph, making it the fastest terrestrial animal on earth relative to its size (it’s about twice as fast as a cheetah). Each individual maintains a complex network of pathways through the grass and scrub of the savanna which it uses to hunt for food– mostly insects, but also seeds in the right season– and escape danger.

The rufous sengi is also basically Elvis for my children right now. We were watching a BBC nature documentary about small animals (Hidden Kingdoms, it’s streaming on Netflix right now and I highly recommend it) when they first discovered it, and for the last month, sengis have been EVERYWHERE in their art, play, and imaginations.

Here’s a knitting pattern for a toy rufous sengi, suitable for an advanced beginner. She measures about 3.5″ from tip of nose to rump, with her tail about the same length as her body, and she stands a petite but powerful ~2″ tall on her specially-adapted long back feet (for zooming) and bitty front feet (for batting obstacles out of her paths in a dismissive manner). Her white “socks” mark her as an adult– juveniles have brown legs and feet. She is perfect for a stocking or an Easter basket, fits in a pocket, and is equally at home racing along the highway or just doing chores!

Sengi “housework”– gotta keep those paths clear!

The sengi’s body is knitted from tip of nose to tip of tail in the round, starting and ending with I-cord. Her ears and front legs are picked up and knit from the body, and her hind legs are knitted separately in the round starting with I-cord and then sewn on.

Supplies:

dk yarn, about 40 yards, in light brown, tan, or rust (MC)

dk yarn, less than 10 yards, in white or cream (CC)

dk yarn, less than a yard, in chocolate or dark brown

two 8mm round black beads for eyes

small amount of stuffing (I used wool)

double-pointed needles, size US 5

yarn needle

Pattern:

using MC yarn, cast 3 sts onto a single needle

working as an I-cord, knit three rows

k1, kfb, k1 (4 sts)

knit one round

*kfb* all around (8 sts)

at this point I arranged my stitches on 3 needles, with 2 sts on the first needle and 3 on each of the others– this arrangement makes it easier to predict the shaping in the head

knit one round

k3, kfb, k1, kfb, k2 (10 sts)

knit one round

k4, kfb, k1, kfb, k3 (12 sts)

knit one round

k3, kfb, k2, kfb, k1, kfb, k2, kfb, k1 (16 sts)

knit one round

kfb, k15 (17 sts)

knit one round

s1k2tog psso, *k2tog* to end of round (8 sts)

knit two rounds

*kfb* around (16 sts)

knit in stockinette until the piece measures about 3″ from the base of the snout (about 3.5″ from the tip of the snout)

*k2tog* around (8 sts)

knit one round

stuff body and head firmly with the stuffing of your choice, remembering to add a little extra if you’re using wool or another stuffing that compacts a lot over time

*k2tog* around (4 sts)

knit 1 round

k1, k2tog, k1 (3 sts)

slide all sts onto a single needle and work I-cord until tail is about 2″ long

k2tog, k1 (2 sts)

continue in I-cord until tail is about 3″ long

k2tog (1 st)

break yarn and pull through remaining stitch to cinch closed

Front legs:

On the underside of the torso, just after the neck shaping, pick up 5 sts in a ring

Stitch the top of the sengi’s little drumstick securely to the side of her rump with the bind-off edge oriented directly to the top.

Repeat for other hind leg.

Ears:

All shaping is done on the OUTSIDE edge of the ear– the round begins at the inside.

Starting about one stitch away from the top midline of the head and moving outward along the same row of knitting, pick up four sts on one needle, then pick up four sts directly behind those sts on the head (8 sts)

Using MC, knit 2 rows

k3, L-inc, k2, R-inc, k3 (10 sts)

knit one row

k3, k2tog, k2tog, k3 (8sts)

*k2tog* around (4 sts)

break yarn, lace through remaining sts, pull to cinch.

Repeat for second ear on the other side of the midline of the top of the head.

Finishing:

With CC yarn, stitch a shallow “V” shape on each side of the sengi’s nose to frame her eyes.

With dark brown yarn, stitch two short lines from just in front of each her ear about 1-2 stitch lengths forward.

Sew the beads in place securely– between the endpoint of the dark brown line and the angle of the CC “V”– on either side of the head to make eyes. I sewed on both eyes at the same time, securing them with a figure-8 stitch through the inside of the face to help nest the beads into the face more realistically.

Weave in and trim all your yarn and thread ends, and your sengi is ready for whatever fast-paced adventures life sends your way!

I was on strike last Wednesday, you see. I had a whole day to myself, to do whatever I wanted. But I couldn’t work on things for my family or my house, because that would have been scabbing. So I started something new, something that looked fun and would probably teach me things I could stand to learn, but that was far from practical and totally unnecessary.

Something for me.

Those are pretty rare projects, honestly– I usually prioritize the children, then Robert, then the house, then my extended family, my communities, the earth, strangers, and finally myself.

But I had been gazing wistfully at the Ravelry page for this pattern for months, and it was just so pretty, and my crochet skills lag significantly behind all my other pursuits, which would make it a challenge to begin, much less complete.

So I pulled some leftover scraps of yarn out of my stash and started out, tentatively.

I made a flower, and then expanded it to a star. And in the week since International Women’s Day, I made that star into a sun, and the sun into an octagon, in spare moments here and there between my other work. Now I’m turning the octagon back into a star, slowly but surely, as this project eats up scraps and leftover single skeins from other projects.

As for what I’ll do with it when I’m finished, well, I don’t know. For once, my project is about the process, not the product. Obviously if I finish the whole thing I’ll have a massive piece, big enough to use as a coverlet for my bed, especially if I square up the corners.

Regardless of the finished size, I think what I have here is a fulcrum. A balance point between frost and fire, in dye and animal hair. Witchcraft, in short.

Sometimes you spend money and effort and time incalculable on a project for a child, and they are unmoved by it. Sometimes you throw together something quick and necessary, and it becomes the #1 Best Most Loved Favorite Thing That Accompanies Them Everywhere Until It Is Destroyed By The Sheer Force Of Their Adoration.

Meet Ithilien’s alligator pants. Or what’s left of the seat of his alligator pants, after nearly 3 years of weekly or better wear for the rough-and-tumble kinds of activities which small children find most appealing.

Frankly, I think they held up really well considering they are just linen and muslin and a few errant patches of baby wale corduroy. But now they are no more.

In fact, they met their demise about two months ago, when Ithilien slid down the boulder next to the chicken yard for the bazillionth time. And he was completely distraught when I told him that they were too far gone for the mending basket– not only were they worn transparent in the seat and the cuffs, but they had a permanent crease where I’d let out an earlier hem, and they were size 4T on a child who is now wearing 6/7.

I promised that we could make new alligator pants. And he said, tears still shining on his face, “I want them to be soft and fuzzy like my favorite gray pants.” Which are, of course, some synthetic fleece sweatshop-produced crap that my parents bought at Target when Númenor unexpectedly needed back-up pants while staying with them.

I hemmed and hawed and tried to convince the child of the merits of wool flannel and the all-seasons practicality of midweight linen-hemp canvas and briefly considered buying $24/yard organic cotton sweatshirt fleece in a green he didn’t think was alligatory enough before finally caving in and buying a yard of bright green polyester fleece.

I hate it so much I think I might die.

But Ithilien loves it.

And I’m trying to see the bright side: at least it’s warm. It was cheap. It won’t fray. It looks okay with the patches and accent pocket from the old pants. I won’t lose it in the laundry. My parents can machine wash and dry it if necessary.

Oh, the things we do for love.

I’m using Rae’s Parsley Pants pattern in size 6. I know she designed it for woven fabric, but I’m a rebel (and the previous alligator pants were Parsley Pants). I’m not linking to the cheap polyester fleece, and you can’t make me.